


someday they will be sung

by nubbins_for_all



Series: Winter isn't goin' nowhere [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Bonding, Boy Talk, F/M, Friendship, Jaime is the Leetle Spoon, and so is Gendry tbh, because they just really love their badass warrior women, in conclusion Brienne and Arya for president, so they just wanna talk about how much they love them, who have swords and can beat them up and also make them feel small and safe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-03 23:27:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20275642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nubbins_for_all/pseuds/nubbins_for_all
Summary: Gendry is just minding his business makin' some metal stuff but Jaime just HAS to get in there and start a conversation that may or may not address how much they both really love their badass warrior women who have swords and muscles and can toss them around like dolls.Also, a sealion.





	someday they will be sung

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place before Chapter 5 of "And Counting" but other than that it's smack-dab in the same 'verse, everyone's stuck at Winterfell, perpetual snowstorm, Making Friends, etc.
> 
> Apologies for the truly staggering number of things I don't know about blacksmithing, sealions, GRRM-style names, and medieval prosthetics. Take it up with the complaints department. *hands you my cat who promptly vomits and then headbutts you in search of pets*
> 
> Also I just realized “Jaime with a hook” probably owes some inspiration to astolat. Go read those fics immediately.

_He looks so much like Robert._

Jaime likes the forges. It’s always warm, always busy, and the ring of hammers and anvils comfort him the same way the sound of swordplay does, reliability of metal and strength of arm. In Winterfell the smithy is wide and spacious and less tucked away than in Casterly Rock or King’s Landing, where it is impolite for nobles to catch any glimpse of the sweat and skill that make nobility itself possible. But even so, Jaime doesn’t usually make a habit of hanging around the smiths and their work, except over the last week or so he keeps finding himself there, and he keeps finding Gendry.

_Gendry Waters. Or Gendry Baratheon. Or just Gendry._

_I can understand the desire to have one name all to yourself, when most names are just strings with which the world ties you up and yanks you down._

He hadn’t known about the boy until the feast after the Long Night, when the Dragon Queen had called his name out for all to hear. Any thought he might have spared him then was swiftly extinguished by the later events of the evening _(namely Brienne and getting to touch her for the first time, really touch her, enough to make him forget his own name, let alone that of Robert’s bastard)_. And between all things Brienne and the flurry of winter, Jaime hadn’t thought of him much, if at all, in the months after.

But the other day he’d caught Brienne wrapping her hands in linen like a green squire at a tourney, and when he’d asked she’d said it was for Arya.

“She wants to practice with different weapons,” Brienne has explained, flexing her long, elegant fingers to stretch the linen out. “Dothraki arakhs, the Unsullied spears, some of the smaller blunt melee clubs.”

“And it has to be with you?”

“I’m sworn to both of Lady Catelyn’s daughters, not just Sansa.”

“But you’ve never swung an arakh in your life.”

“So I might as well learn,” she’d said with one eyebrow raised. “We’re all stuck here, those of us who don’t excel at military strategy need _something_ to occupy our minds.”

Jaime had shut up then, because he could hear it in her voice, the frustration he knew so well, when everyone around you had a task and a purpose and you felt yourself a burden. He’d felt it _(and still did it at times)_ in the years since they took his hand, and he’d done a lot of things to deal with it, most of them far less productive and harmless than training with a new weapon.

But it meant that every night that week Brienne would retire to their rooms and talk about Arya Stark, and Jaime didn’t want to tell her that he found the young Stark deeply unsettling, but he did: her wide grey eyes, sharp as Valyrian steel and dangerous as a storm on the sea, her implacable face, the way she moved like her bones were quicksilver and she could slide under doors and through keyholes. He remembered her as a child from the first time they’d visited Winterfell, eyes still big and grey but nothing more, the questing eyes of a child, her pudgy face as she glared at him and Cersei for being rude to her father.

“She’s brilliant,” Brienne would gush, “so fast it’s like trying to get a hit on the wind. I keep telling her she shouldn’t waste her time with greatswords or maces or anything like that, they’ll be too heavy and slow her down and it’s that speed that makes her a master swordsman, ‘water-dancing,’ she calls it, you should see me trying to learn, a great blundering beast—”

“You’re nothing of the kind,” he’d murmured, kissing her neck and sliding his good hand under her shirt.

“She’s well-suited to spears,” Brienne had continued, now slightly breathless, “they’re light and she has the balance right. Grey Worm is a good teacher, even if he does get a l-little impatient, I know I certainly do, at least I did with—_ah—_with Pod—”

“Pod worships you,” Jaime said into her neck, following the words with another open-mouthed kiss before he was back up to her hear, teeth worrying the lobe, pushing his nose into the shell, breathing hard right into it because he knew how much she liked that, and yes, there it was, a full-body shudder, and with a weak moan she let him pull back onto the bed, her head on the pillows.

“The Dothraki…she wants to learn to f-fight on hor—oh Gods—on horses, I can do that with, _mmmmmm_, a sword but not the arakhs, she wants to learn _everything_, Jaime, oh, _oh, _yes—”

He had her shirt all the way off now, his teeth pinching her nipple just hard enough to make her squeak but not enough to make her bleed, while his hand worked its way down, and her nails scraped stinging lines across his shoulder blade and he could feel the new calluses and raw spots formed by the linen and it all made his blood boil.

“And—and she—_ah_—”

“I missed that, sorry.”

“I _said,”_ she grunted, bucking slightly as she wrapped a leg around his neck and squeezed hard, the way he liked it, “she’s asking Gendry to make her these strange things, daggers with hidden compartments, chainmail with a clip she can detach, it’s like she’s trying to—_Jaime!”_

He would have replied, but where his mouth was at the moment, she wouldn’t have heard him.

The name lingered though, later, in the sleepy moments after he’d made her shout and curse and she’d made him do the same only she covered his mouth with her hand and pressed down and he _liked_ that, very much, and then finally they’d crawled into bed, sweaty and satisfied and smelling a bit ripe but who wasn’t, these days? He’d been falling asleep, neck tucked under her chin, when it drifted across his mind.

_Gendry. Lord of the Stormlands. Son of Robert Baratheon. A smith who services the Starks. How strange he and I have come together here, in this place, after the end of the world._

The boy has been named a Lord Paramount by the Dragon Queen, but he doesn’t really seem to care. It certainly hasn’t kept him from spending much of his day at the crucible and anvil, pounding away with those terrifying smithy muscles that are thick and hard as tree trunks. Jaime doesn’t blame him. For one thing, any actual authority wielded by the Dragon Queen remains a tense question in their Northern stronghold, especially with the majority of her forces absent now as they wait out the winter in less crowded quarters. For another, he knows how it feels to be fitted with that same title, like a horse being fitted for a bit or a dog for a collar. He fought and twisted when they came for him, how can he blame Gendry for hiding?

_Just as Robert would hide, in women and drink, in his own fat flesh. This boy hides in hard work, in a craft._

_Would you be proud, Robert? Or would you scorn him as you scorned it all by the end?_

And so the next day, after he’d finished meeting with Davos and Jon Snow and done a little work in the kitchen, Jaime had wandered down to the forges, where he stood behind a large rack of spearheads and watched Gendry work.

This is the fourth time in a week now.

Gendry seems to be working on a suit of child’s armor, at least that’s what he assumes at first because of the small proportions and lightened plating, but the longer her watches the more Jaime suspects it’s something else. He notices the tricky designs Gendry is working off of, the care he puts into thinning and bracing the plates, the intricacy of his tooling. The boy has no fear of the flame and the heat, running his fingers overs pieces of metal that to Jaime’s eyes are still glowing from the fire.

Jaime remembers the smith from Casterly Rock, Gorren, and his hands that looked like they were carved from wood, so glossy-smooth with healed burns and calcified scars that there didn’t seem to be anything human left in them, and indeed the strength of them was inhuman, monstrous, magnificent. Gorren had been ancient when Jaime left home, a gnarled figure of pure muscle with wild white hair sprouting everywhere but the top of his head. Gendry is young, dark, handsome, and already Jaime can see his work would have matched Gorren’s, rivaled it even. He has those same hands, but they are nimble with youth. His eyes see more clearly, his arm swings smoother.

_Robert was like that, once. The best of the best. The Hurricane from the Stormlands._

It’s been years since Jaime could think of Robert’s face or voice or name without a sharp acidic burst of hate in his chest, metallic at the back of his throat, chewing and tearing at his breastbone. The memories are endless: Robert’s broad hand around Cersei’s wrist, Robert’s hearty laugh as he fucked four women in Cersei’s marriage bed, Robert’s name nailed to his children, _his_ children, but Robert claimed them, as he claimed everything, all the food and all the gold and all the land and all that Jaime loved, Robert swallowed it up until his fat face was bursting and then he laughed, laughed, _laughed—_

“You’re the Kingslayer, aren’t you?”

Jaime freezes like a startled deer at the sound of that Flea Bottom accent, Gods, even young and raised in commoner’s shit he sounds like his father, all bluntness and challenge.

Gendry stands before him, a hammer held loosely at his side, his head cocked to one side. Jaime has to fight the urge to wrap his own hand around the hilt of his sword.

“I have been called that, once or twice,” he finally replies. Gendry blinks but doesn’t move. “My name, however, is Jaime.”

“Jaime Lannister.”

“Gendry Baratheon.” The boy stiffens. “Lord of Storm’s End, son of King Robert. You look like him.”

“The dead kings and their sister looked like you,” Gendry says plainly. “You went into his bed and fucked his wife, your twin, and then you both sent the Gold Cloaks out to kill his bastards. But they didn’t get me. So now that I’m alive, why shouldn’t I kill you?”

Jaime considers the question. The other smiths aren’t paying attention to their conversation, but he knows if a fight broke out they’d come to Gendry’s aid in an instant and he wouldn’t have time to cry out before ten hammers would turn his jaw to pulp. Even with his right hand, Jaime couldn’t have stopped them. And in all honesty, he didn’t really feel like he would have the right to, even if the boy isn’t quite on the mark.

“I could try and kill you first.”

“You _were_ famous, once,” Gendry says lightly, his massive arms flexing. “We used to play ‘Kingslayer’ in the back courtyards, with sticks and fireplace pokers. Now you’ve got one hand and a useless stump. I wouldn’t even need a stick to break you.”

Jaime can’t argue with that.

“I never ordered the Gold Cloaks after Robert’s children, and neither did Cersei. Joffrey did that. He found murder to be a very convenient solution to most problems.” It’s been a long time since Jaime felt any pangs of guilt for speaking the truth about Joffrey. There were too many victims to pretend.

“Why should I believe you?” Gendry asks, his head cocked to one side. Jaime shrugs.

“Why would I lie?”

“Because that’s what you do. It’s what most lords and ladies do.”

“The Dragon Queen has asked me to help plan the attack on King’s Landing, she’ll be cross if you kill me.”

“The king you killed was her father, she’ll understand.”

“I killed him to save people like you.”

“From what?”

“Does it matter? Your mother lived, Robert became king, he fucked her in a tavern hallway and you were—”

The hammer moves so fast Jaime hears it before he sees, the deafening clang as the hammer connects with the stone wall three inches to the right of his head, and his ears ring even as he realizes that Gendry is now very close to him, Robert’s face staring out from behind his like a mask on inside-out.

“Say another word about my mother and I really will kill you.”

“I’m sorry,” Jaime replies through teeth that feel numb with the vibration of the hammer blow. “She was a brave woman, to raise you as—”

Again it’s too fast to see but the hammer is suddenly under his nose, the blunt iron pressing his lips back.

“I said another word. That was a bunch of words.”

Jaime nods slowly, tasting blood as the pressure grates his teeth against his lips. He can hear his breath in his own throat.

But then it’s gone, and Gendry is stepping back, hammer falling to his side again, and for the first time Jaime loses track of the Robert in him.

“I’m not lying about any of it,” he says quietly, looking Gendry right in the eye. “I hated your father but he never hurt my children, why would I hurt his?”

“…I hated him too.”

Gendry says this like he says everything, a fact, no game or drapery on the words. “Once I found out who he was, who I was. Then I realized it didn’t matter if I hated him or not, ‘cause either way I’d still be in the same shit and he’d still be in the ground, turning into shit.”

“You don’t seem to be in shit any longer.”

“I nearly had my face bitten off by a dead man and the Dragon Queen named me Lord Paramount of a place I’ve never been. It’s not shit but it doesn’t smell any better.”

“A boy from Flea Bottom would know.” Jaime takes a deep breath. “I was born to silks and titles and a father worth hating. I wish I’d figured out where the rot came from earlier, I—I would like to have had your eye for it.”

“I may be his son but that doesn’t make him my father,” Gendry says, and Jaime smiles before he can stop himself.

“Then you must have gotten it from your mother.”

A long moment between them, the roar of the forges and the clamor of smithing filling the empty spaces. Then Gendry gives a little snort and turns back to his anvil, and Jaime thinks he might feel something old and petrified inside of him break off and fall away.

Gendry doesn’t acknowledge him but Jaime stays, watching him work from much closer now, following the sure movements of his hands and the extraordinarily delicate way they handle the pliable metal. He’s working on a cuisse now, shaping it and engraving elegant gilt accents. He’s also inserting tiny shards of what looks like dragonglass, jagged half-moons the size of fingernails, spiraling around the edges of the piece. It seems to be half of a larger design. Jaime wonders what the counterpart will be made of.

“That’s very fine armor,” he says without really thinking, because it is and in spite of himself he likes this boy, the last vestige of the man whom he hated more than anyone else for almost twenty years and whose death has sent his life tumbling into all kinds of oblivion. If Gendry still wants to kill him and a compliment is what puts him over the edge, well, Jaime will accept his fate.

_Actually, he’ll probably run for Brienne. She’ll be able to fight the lad off, even if she’ll then give Jaime shit for the rest of his life._

“Thanks,” Gendry replies without looking up, his thick, brutal fingers graceful as a Dornish dancer where they play over the armor. Encouraged, Jaime moves a step closer.

“It’s too small for you.”

“It’s not for me.”

Jaime blinks, and realizes he’s an idiot.

“I thought she didn’t want armor because it was too heavy.”

Gendry glances sharply at him, and for the first time Jaime thinks he may have found a spot on the boy not hardened by burns or covered by muscle. “How do you know what she wants?”

“Ser Brienne has spent this last week training with Lady Arya,” Jaime says casually.

“Don’t you think I know that?”

“I beg your pardon, Lord Baratheon.” Gendry grinds his teeth. Jaime uses his good hand to pick up one of the tiny dragonglass beads and turn it over, watching the firelight wink off of it. “But you did ask. They’re probably off together right now.”

“So?”

“So I’ve heard a great deal about what an extraordinary fighter she is.”

“She’s more than extraordinary, she’s a bloody miracle,” Gendry snaps, and Jaime nods, not looking up.

“Even if she hadn’t killed the Night King and, you know, saved the world from death and destruction, I think only a fool would disagree.”

Beside him, he can feel Gendry relax slightly. They share silence as Gendry continues fiddling with the armor and Jaime watches, both enjoying and envying the skill the boy has in his two healthy hands.

_I had two hands once. And I could perform my own miracles._

“Ser Brienne,” Gendry says suddenly, eyes still down on his work. “She’s—she’s a fuckin’ wonder of a fighter.”

Something in Jaime’s chest swells, a bubble of pure warmth, and he catches himself smiling.

_Thank the Gods Tyrion isn’t here, or the Hound. I’d never hear the end of it._

“That she is.”

“Tallest woman I’ve ever seen.”

“She killed three enemy soldiers in about seven seconds. Using their own weapons.” If Jaime closes his eyes he can still picture it, her tousled hair, her gleaming bronze armor, the way her face twisted as she shrieked and pivoted and swung and won the fight before it started. He’d had nothing clever to say in the moment, no barb to throw, only the capacity to stare open-mouthed at—what had Gendry said?—at this wonder of a woman, and she’d told him to “_stay”_ in a voice like he’d never heard before, not from a woman, and it was exciting and enraging and he had dreamed of it countless times for years before he first touched her.

_Could that have been when my heart shifted? Maybe. Maybe it was all when._

“Arya got us out of Harrenhal when your father had us captor there,” Gendry says, his voice soft. “She escaped King’s Landing, escaped your soldiers, brought us with her when she escaped again, and then she went to Braavos and came back with—with everything.”

“They say she trained with the Faceless Men,” Jaime says, try not to sound too curious, but Gendry just smirks ever so slightly and reaches for the tongs.

“Whatever she did, she’s better at it than anyone. She’s better at anything she tries, even if she’s never done it before. She’s not afraid of—she doesn’t cry or complain or even rage, no matter what happens to her, she’s too strong for that. But she’s not cold, either.”

“Brienne seemed cold at first. Of course I was being a right royal cock to her at the time, but she protected me anyway, and when I was lying there in my own shit with a bloody stump for a hand she was there too. I’m alive because of her.”

“Arya tried to fight the Brotherhood of Banners when they sold me to the Red Woman. She could have turned me in or left me behind or sold me herself so many times, but she didn’t. I think she’s the one who murdered the Freys. She never lets anyone be forgotten.”

“Brienne told me once she never thought to fear for herself. Only for those who needed her protection. And then she feared her own weakness. But the woman has no weakness. Not the kind she means. She holds up the world.”

“Arya can drink like a sailor and not get drunk.”

“Brienne doesn’t drink, but when she does she makes the worst jokes.”

“Arya likes to push me around, the way men do, she’s strong. I’ve never known a lady who could do that so easily. Like she’s not embarrassed or—or—”

“Or like she doesn’t care if you think her less a lady for it.”

Gendry pulls something out of the fire. It looks like a gorget, small and delicate, slightly pointed in a V. Beads of sweat break out over Jaime’s face from the heat of it, glowing white-pink, but Gendry tosses it onto the anvil and picks up his tools like a fishmonger about to gut a salmon.

“There aren’t any songs about them,” he says, even as his face shines wet and he wipes sooty sweat from his eyes with one forearm, balancing the clamps with the other.

“Songs?” Jaime repeats.

“You know, songs, ballads, poems. There are loads about pretty women in dresses, long shining hair, all soft and delicate—”

“The maiden fair,” he snorts, and Gendry nods seriously.

“Right. Waiting for their knight or their lord or their husband to come back home. But there’s none, really, about…”

“Other women?” Jaime feels that warmth inside him like another forge-fire, burning in his heart and his gut.

_Knights on horseback, short golden hair, bold blue eyes._

“Yes. Women who…go out and…do things, themselves. There are no songs about women like that. Why is that?”

Gendry is working the gorget carefully, his brow furrowed, and though he looks more like Robert than ever in this moment, Jaime finds he has none of that acid rushing through him, none of that poison feeling that Robert’s face calls up in him.

Instead, he feels like clapping Gendry on the shoulder and coming up with a song right there, the two of them, about the women who live their own lives and swing their own swords and who bestow their love on blessed but undeserving men like himself and the bastard of Robert Baratheon.

“I think most men who write songs would be too frightened of women like that,” he says instead, and Gendry looks up from his work, and they’re both grinning.

“Men like the poncy bastards who play court ballads?”

“And the drunken louts who sing in Flea Bottom taverns.”

“Can’t see any of them doing justice to women like that.”

“Or keeping their bowels in check if they were called to task by those same women.”

“They’re lucky women like that don’t waste their time disciplining men like them,” Gendry says.

“_We’re_ lucky women like that waste their time on men like us,” Jaime replies.

Gendry actually laughs, and Jaime has to fight the urge to hug the boy.

_Gods, I really _am_ turning into a cuddly fucking housecat._

_Oh, who gives a shit, anyway._

“Arya loves training with Ser Brienne,” Gendry tells him as he tempers the gorget, speaking louder over the hiss. “Never shuts up about her. Says once winter’s over she wants to take her from Lady Sansa and ride down together to King’s Landing to kill the—”

Gendry stop himself _just_ in time. Not that Jaime doesn’t know what he was going to say, not that he doesn’t feel a wave of nausea at the thought of Brienne riding off with that vicious little wolf to go and bare herself to Cersei’s claws, he would die before he’d let that happen, he’ll fight Arya if he has to—

“She says a lot of things, though,” Gendry says awkwardly, trying to step over his own words. “That she wants to sail off the edge of the world. That she wants to climb the Wall. That she’ll take the Dragon Queen’s armies back to Essos—I think she wants to do all of it, just can’t decide. Being stuck in one place so long can make a body restless.”

“You don’t say,” Jaime mumbles, watching the fire. Without thinking about it, he pulls his right sleeve back and warms the edge of his stump in the heat from the embers. The golden hand has been gathering dust in their room for weeks, and nobody at Winterfell is surprised or repulsed by his stump anymore, but it does still ache when blizzards are due, and it’s hard to keep warm.

“Where’s your hand?” Gendry asks. Jaime chews on his tongue.

“Probably rotting somewhere in Harrenhal.”

“No, I meant—the gold one.”

Oh. Jaime pretends to himself that he didn’t blush.

“It’s—I don’t wear it anymore. Bloody uncomfortable, and worse, useless.”

“What about a hook?”

Jaime isn’t quite sure how to respond. He hasn’t—there was never—he has a golden hand, that’s how they fixed the problem, that was it. What about _nothing_.

“I knew a bloke back home who had a hook,” Gendry continues as he sets the gorget aside. “Mennick, got run over by a cart when he was a kid, lost his hand and one eye. But my master made him a hook when he got older and he was real slick with it. Could eat, climb, fight, dress himself. I remember the design.”

“Good for Mennick.”

Gendry shrugs and pulls a black velvet pouch out from somewhere and gently upturns it on the anvil. What look like tiny pellets of moonlight tumble out onto the black iron. Jaime squints and sees that they’re mother-of-pearl beads, the same shape as the dragonglass ones Gendry was fitting to the armor. So that’s the other half of the pattern.

“I could make you one.”

Jaime doesn’t dare look at him.

“Make me a hook?”

“If you want it. Wouldn’t be difficult, just steel and some leatherwork. It’s your choice, but I know if I’d—well. Mennick seemed to get along all right.”

Jaime isn’t quite sure how to feel. Robert Baratheon’s bastard son is offering to make him a hook, to replace his stupid fucking metal hand. How would he even learn to use it? Would he spend all day catching it on things, ripping his clothes, embarrassing himself even worse than he used to when his hand was freshly gone? He’s accepted this, being pathetic and crippled, fighting with one hand, trusting Brienne not to lie but believing that she’s truly wrong when she tells him he’s nothing less of a man. He doesn’t need a hook.

_Lannister, you shouldn’t even be _alive_ right now. Get over yourself and take the damn hook._

“I—I would want it,” Jaime says haltingly. “If it’s not too much—I mean—”

“I told you, it’s not difficult.”

Gendry has just the tiniest bit of a smirk on his face as he continues to fit mother-of-pearl into Arya’s armor. Jaime remembers feeling like that, feeling invincibly good at that one thing he _knew_ how to do, and part of him resent the boy and part of him wants to warn him, _it’s not forever_, and he settles for picking up a long dragonglass spearhead where it sits discarded on a nearby stool and saying with exaggerated disbelief, “And what about this? Would you call reforging this slippery brittle shit ‘difficult’?”

They spend the next half hour chatting about nothing that really matters, dragonglass and Northern winters and the King’s Landing of ten years ago, before everything went to hell, and it only comes to an end when a clear voice with a petulant edge to it calls out, “What’s going on here?”

Jaime swivels around where he’s seated on a little stool, watching Gendry use pliers on rings of chainmail, and sees Arya Stark staring at him with a mixture of hostility and curiosity. A pace or two behind her is Brienne, towering over the little wolf, one eyebrow raised. Both of their faces are flushed and shiny, their hair sticks in clumps to their sweaty foreheads, and though they wear fur-lined cloaks as one must do past three o’clock in the winter, Jaime can see their linens shirts bare beneath, sheer and clinging where exertion has soaked through.

It’s a good look on Brienne.

“Talkin,” says Gendry amiably, never as thrown by Arya as the rest of the world seems to be. Her wide eyes narrow slightly and she strides forward, all quick movements and silent paces. Jaime wonders if it was the Faceless Men she trained with, or a sorcerer, or someone no one else has ever heard of. When it comes to the girl who ended the War Against the Dead, nothing is impossible.

“Talking about what?” she demands, her eyes flicking towards Jaime. He stands and inclines his head respectfully, feeling rather than seeing how close Brienne watches him.

“Lord Gendry has been educating a dull old soldier on a number of things, my lady,” he says with a resolute straight face. Gendry chuckles under his breath and glances at Arya, who is looking Jaime right in the eye, her gaze piercing. He fights the urge to take a step back.

“How did the training go today?” Jaime asks, trying for casual. Brienne rolls her neck and sighs.

“The saber is a difficult weapon. Lady Arya has a strength for it but I—”

“You’re brilliant, like you always are,” Arya says, and in her voice is a strange challenge, like she expects Jaime to argue with her. Instead he glances at Brienne and grins when she blushes.

“The lady speaks truth, Ser Brienne.”

“Thank you, ser,” she replies, glaring at him.

“What else did you talk about?” asks Arya. She takes a few steps forward, light as a shadow. The glow from the forge makes her eyes look twice as big.

“I’m thinking to make Ser Jaime a hook for his stump,” Gendry says in his plain way. Arya’s eyes don’t move, even as her lips twitch.

“A hook. What would he need it for?” She speaks as though he isn’t there in front of her, even as she holds his eyes, her chin high and proud. Jaime smiles.

_She is her mother’s daughter._

“I’m not sure yet, my lady. Perhaps for catching fish, if nothing else,” he says. Gendry rolls his eyes and somewhere to his right, Brienne snorts. But Arya’s face doesn’t change.

“It’s dangerous to give a lion his claws back.” Her voice is much lower suddenly, as though it comes from the shadows of her cloak. Jaime feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “Some would say gut the beast now, while it’s still licking its wounds, and wear its pelt as a warning to the rest of its pride.”

Gendry stiffens. Brienne shuffles, coming into view, real concern on her face now. But Jaime keep Arya’s gaze and holds on tight.

Once, when they were about eight or so, Jaime and Cersei had been playing down on the beach, further towards the rock than they were supposed to go but Cersei had threatened the guards and pranced past with her blonde hair flying and of course no one stopped them. They’d been gamboling in the surf, splashing each other and shrieking, when a bellowing roar unlike anything Jaime had ever heard before split the air.

It was a sealion, a massive bull that stood tall as their father on his front paws and bared teeth the size of steak knives. Later, Jaime would realize that they’d come too close to the rocks and caves where families of sealions and smaller seals would sometimes settle and breed, and the bull they’d encountered had probably been protecting his mate and their brood. But in that moment, all he’d been able to think of was the absolute danger before him, the power of the muscles beneath that slick coat, the serrated edges of those teeth, the claws and the speed and everything else this animal had at its disposal to kill him and his sister before they could even cry out for help.

Jaime’s body had told him what to do, even it was already hopeless, and that was run, run, run—but even as he’d spun on his heel, Cersei’s hand had come down over his wrist in an iron grip, and he’d looked up and seen her beautiful golden face shining, her eyes hard and set, as she’d stared back at the beast, opened her little pink mouth, and screamed as loud as she possibly could.

It was nothing, the toot of a child’s flute beside the wail of a battlehorn, but it had gone all the way through Jaime, his sister’s own roar, and the sealion had growled and pawed the sand and tossed its humungous head, but it hadn’t charged, and Cersei had bared her teeth and tossed her own head even as she slowly backed up, dragging Jaime along by his wrist, up and up and up the beach until finally the sealion made a loud satisfied snuffling noise and turned and waddled back into the rocks, and then they’d both turned as one and sprinted inland.

Later, Jaime realized he’d pissed himself. Cersei had been disgusted and told him so, laughing cruelly when he’d cried after the double lashing Father had him given for disobeying the rules and for acting like a coward. But long after the scars from the whipping faded, Jaime never forgot the way Cersei had faced down a monster the size of a mountain, spoken to it in its own language, and whether it decided she was no threat or too much of one, had walked away with her life and her courage intact.

Eye to eye with Arya Stark now, Jaime allows himself to remember his sister just once, how she was long long ago, before everything, and follows her lead as he always has.

“I am not a lion, Lady Arya,” he says quietly. “I am just another man with a part to play, small as it is, and I would play it well, for my country and my companions. If a hook can serve that purpose, then I am grateful to Lord Gendry for his help. I am already grateful to a great many.”

Somewhere out in the forges, a hammer falls. And again. And again.

Arya smiles. She does it with half her mouth, the hint of a curve, but it’s there, and her left hand is flashing to her hip and then her little sword Needle is pointing up at the beams above and it glitters in the firelight. She twirls it lazily, her wrist strong, the blade fluid, and in her right hand now is the dagger everybody knows, the one that saved the world.

“I could teach you,” she says. Her voice sounds like hers again, maybe even a little amused, a little younger. “Sword in the left, short blade in the right. Same thing as a hook, if you use it well enough.”

Jaime wants to laugh, wants to say _I was once a better swordsman than you’ve ever been in your own dreams, little girl_, but he bites his tongue and smiles stiffly.

“Thank you, my lady, but—"

“Thank you, my lady,” Brienne interrupts loudly, very suddenly appearing at Jaime’s side. “A generous offer indeed. Ser Jaime and I will leave you now. Good night, Lady Arya, Lord Gendry.”

“Night,” says Gendry, looking bewildered, as Arya smirks and nods her head, and with barely enough time to nod his own goodbye, Jaime finds himself summarily yanked from the forges, almost flying off his feet as Brienne drags him bodily by his upper arm between the fires and out through the door into the cool dark underpass.

“I swear to all the Gods, Jaime,” she growls as the heavy wooden door swings shut behind them and they’re lit only by flickering torches.

“You swear what, Ser Brienne?”

“You just barely got out of that conversation without having your throat cut, and then if I hadn’t pulled you away you would have said some needlessly irritating, completely humorless ‘joke’ just to piss her off—”

“I wouldn’t!”

“Oh please.”

“I’m not the rude one, that’s you, bolting from the presence of a Lord and Lady like that. Have you no shame?”

“Jaime,” she growls, her hands flexing like she wants to grab her sword and run him through.

Without the heat from the forges, he’s suddenly clammy and cold, shivering despite himself. Brienne rolls her eyes but pulls him in by the same grip she used to drag him out, tucking him under her arm and letting her cloak fall over his shoulders. He wraps his right arm around her waist and hugs her close, turning and speaking into the space behind her ear, under the flip of her hair.

“I left my cloak in the kitchens,” he says, going for a combination of playful and pitiful. She snorts and hip-checks him, though not hard enough to mean he’s not potentially fucking her tonight. He breathes right into her ear and—

_There we go, goosebumps. So easy, Brienne of Tarth._

“What were you and Lord Gendry talking about down there? You were getting along like a shack on fire,” she says in a challenging tone, trying to regain the upper hand. Jaime shrugs and pulls her gently towards the stairs to the ground level, where they’ll hopefully be able to find something to eat and then go back to their room and then he can _really_ give her goosebumps.

“Oh, this and that. His drunken boor of a father and why the lad shouldn’t kill me on the spot, that sort of thing. It was pleasant enough.”

“Jaime,” she says a little softer, and when he glances at her he can see the sincerity, even when she’s annoyed with him, she wants to make sure he’s okay, that he’s not playing it off light when his wounds are reopened, because she knows about all of them and she has no qualms about helping him stanch the blood and stitch them shut again.

_I’m the easy one. Gods, I love her._

“It’s all right,” he assures her, and she relaxes a little bit against him as they start to ascend the stairs, still locked together under her cloak. “That’s not all we talked about.”

“What else, then?”

Her body is strong beside his, and the look she gives him has nothing coy or demure about it, and he could never in a thousand years regret her. Not the way Robert regretted the mother of his real children or his false ones, not the way he and Cersei are wrapped in regret and longing and pain, not even the way Arya Stark must regret her wild childhood innocence, strong though she is without it. Brienne is home, has always been, even before they found each other. His blessings are all gathered up in her and her choice of him, loving him, wanting him, having him.

“Songs,” he says, and turns at the top of the stairs to kiss the confused frown off her lovely face.

**Author's Note:**

> Bros with their Bottom Energy and Ladies with their Top Energy. What can I say.


End file.
